The Spread of Sanskrit* (Published In: from Turfan to Ajanta
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Serveur académique lausannois Spread of Sanskrit 1 Johannes Bronkhorst Section de langues et civilisations orientales Université de Lausanne Anthropole CH-1009 Lausanne The spread of Sanskrit* (published in: From Turfan to Ajanta. Festschrift for Dieter Schlingloff on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday. Ed. Eli Franco and Monika Zin. Lumbini International Research Institute. 2010. Vol. 1. Pp. 117-139.) A recent publication — Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word (2005) — presents itself in its subtitle as A Language History of the World. Understandably, it deals extensively with what it calls “world languages”, languages which play or have played important roles in world history. An introductory chapter addresses, already in its title, the question “what it takes to be a world language”. The title also provides a provisional answer, viz. “you never can tell”, but the discussion goes beyond mere despair. It opposes the “pernicious belief” which finds expression in a quote from J. R. Firth, a leading British linguist of the mid-twentieth century (p. 20): “World powers make world languages [...] Men who have strong feelings directed towards the world and its affairs have done most. What the humble prophets of linguistic unity would have done without Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Sanskrit and English, it it difficult to imagine. Statesmen, soldiers, sailors, and missionaries, men of action, men of strong feelings have made world languages. They are built on blood, money, sinews, and suffering in the pursuit of power.” Ostler is of the opinion that this belief does not stand up to criticism: “As soon as the careers of languages are seriously studied — even the ‘Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Sanskrit and English’ that Firth explicitly mentions as examples — it becomes clear that this self-indulgently tough-minded view is no guide at all to what really makes a language capable of spreading.” He continues on the following page (p.
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